Get your 'false equivalence' disclaimers ready, uber-progressive metropolitan San Francisco is once again leading America in anti-science beliefs. Unlike something silly and annoying, like acceptance of evolution, progressive anti-science kills people.

The Waldorf School of the Peninsula in Los Altos, California, at a cool $24,000 per year for high school students, is delightfully kooky in its mission statement and its desire to frame education through social justice issues. Hey, I don't care about that, people with money can send their kids to anything they want, be it religious or morally relativistic postmodernism like this, but even religious people accept that vaccines are good for kids.

Not so for the anti-science hippies sending their kids to this place. Look at this chart, courtesy of The Bay Citizen:

That's a shocking level below herd immunity, even below the anti-science hippies in Seattle. 73% 'personal belief' exemption, which is codespeak for 'we do not accept science'. Does conservative Alabama have this dangerous anti-science belief? No they do not.

Comments

Hank, do the articles provide any demographic information about the parents of children in this school? At $24K per year for tuition, they certainly can't claim to be paupers without access to health insurance.

So it is probably related to their belief system, as you propose. Drug companies all claim to be 'evidence-based' in their decision making, but it is never 100%. Every company has its religion and makes some decisions based on faith. The same goes for family values.

The Conservative Right claims to have a monopoly on appropriate family values, often consisting of the Holey Trinity of the following:

'Intelligent Design' (the Earth was created in 4004 BC based on the cumulative ages of Biblical characters) vs. Evolution (Darwin was a fraud)

Pinpointing with scientific precision the exact time of onset of life. Can they do the same for the back end, i.e. exact time of death? How exactly is that defined?

Education can be a slow process. When these children come down with measles, mumps, or chicken pox and have to stay home from school (and possibly give their unprrotected parents shingles from Herpes Zoster or adult versions of other childhood infections), maybe the children will be able to teach their children.

Or when the parents get infected by methicillin-resistant staph aureous, they will begin to understand the concept of evolution.

Hank, do the articles provide any demographic information about the parents of children in this school? At $24K per year for tuition, they certainly can't claim to be paupers without access to health insurance.

We know the demographics (political and income) based on voting - you don't vote 80% for Obama and have Democrats in state government and Congress unless you are heavily Democrat and the area is primarily white, whereas Santa Clara in the chart includes Silicon Valley proper and that is more engineering. Silicon Valley is about 40% white.

Not sure what intelligent design has to do with any of this or why you bring it up. Evolution education is important, as I said, but a kooky school district in Texas will not cause anyone to die if they try and teach religion. Same with climate change or not having more kids go to adoptions instead of being aborted. Progressive attitudes about vaccines, however - the article I did before showed that conservative cities and regions do not share that flaw - kill people, as has been shown throughout history.

These parents and their anti-vaccination ideas are placing themselves at the mercy of natural selection. What's even more unfortunate is that their children are at the mercy of their reasoning.

I'm just hoping that those stats are just a selling point--like it's "cool" to say it, but that secretly they are actually vaccinating their kids, but having tried to debate with some anti-vaccination parents, I believe I'm engaging in wishful thinking.

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Unless it's William Blake writing... and even then..., always second guess the thoughts behind irregular punctuation.